Religion, at its best, helps people to bring this foundational divine love into ever-increasing consciousness. In other words, it's more about waking up than about cleaning up.

Does the Almighty One operate from a scarcity model of love and forgiveness?

When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God's love for you and the universe you call home.

In the Franciscan school, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God's own creation for its failures. Love cannot be bought by some "necessary sacrifice"; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects.

But God loves things by becoming them.

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

God is gathering us out of all regions till he can make resurrection of our own hearts from the very earth [emphasis added], and teach us that we are all of one substance, and members of one another; for the one who loves his neighbor loves God, and the one who loves God, loves his own soul.

God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

I'll say it again: God loves things by becoming them.

Knowing and loving God is our greatest privilege, and being known and loved is God's greatest pleasure.

God has never made a person he didn't love. Everybody matters to him.

We bring God glory by loving other believers.